Although China is usually criticized for online censorship practices, it is only right with regard to political issues. On the other hand, the US is now quickly becoming the most active country in terms of commercial censorship. The country keeps proving that protecting commercial interests is of more value than protecting the rights of the public. This may sound ironic, but BitTorrent tracker websites may choose to move to China in order to save their freedom.

After the Homeland Security committed almost a hundred of domain seizures last week, lots of the BitTorrent site operators are considering the backup plans if they also find themselves targeted soon. Several dozen websites have already registered alternative domain names, for example the semi-private tracker Demonoid, which already moved to .me domain a few days ago. One more ironic result of the seizures is that the Chinese domain names seem to be favored by many websites looking for backup option. Owner of isoHunt, Gary Fung, is among the site owners who already had a .hk domain – just in case.

Actually, Gary Fung is based in Canada and runs his company there, but he has been fighting the entertainment industry in American courts for almost five years now. At the moment, isoHunt is appealing a court decision that forced the service to implement a word filter for movie-related keywords for American visitors. But that order was made through the normal legal channels, while the US government has last weekend stretched the boundaries of commercial censorship. In result, the operator of Torrent-Finder service appeared to be the first to lose control over his .com domain without any prior warning and opportunity to defend himself.

Now, facing the close enforcement of the COICA legislation, many services feel that this type of censorship will only increase, and it worries them. Gary Fang noted that countries like China do censor the web, but for political reason, while American COICA will filter for copyright and commercial reason. The US authorities don’t conceal that last week’s seizures were a response to complaints from entertainment companies. The current situation makes many site owners believe that it would only take one seizure warning to close a site down, no matter infringing or not. In this light, China is quite an attractive place for BitTorrent websites like isoHunt to move to if needed.

Sam, this statement is frightening: "the US is now quickly becoming the most active country in terms of commercial censorship. The country keeps proving that protecting commercial interests is of more value than protecting the rights of the public"

You would think more Americans would be outraged at this idea of censorship. It's truly sad to see that the govt would rather protect the interests of a few rather than the majority in whole. How long till I have to be in bed by 9 lol